RRE Ventureshttp://www.businessinsider.com/category/rre-ventures
en-usFri, 09 Dec 2016 23:13:29 -0500Fri, 09 Dec 2016 23:13:29 -0500The latest news on RRE Ventures from Business Insiderhttp://static3.businessinsider.com/assets/images/bilogo-250x36-wide-rev.pngBusiness Insiderhttp://www.businessinsider.com
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-case-for-microservices-in-the-enterprise-2015-4Here's why we need microservices in the enterprisehttp://www.businessinsider.com/the-case-for-microservices-in-the-enterprise-2015-4
Wed, 08 Apr 2015 10:03:43 -0400Lenny Pruss
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/5525340b69bedd8c753a96f4-1200-924/men-working-laptop-computers.jpg" border="0" alt="men working laptop computers"></p><p>Since my <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/how-developers-became-the-organizations-most-influential-power-brokers-2014-10">last post</a> exploring the platform shift happening in today’s datacenter, the question I’ve been asked most often is, “sure, microservices, distributed architectures and containerization might make sense for the Google’s and Facebook’s of the world, but what about everyone else who doesn’t operate at Web scale?”</p>
<p>It’s true that the never-before-seen scale requirements thrust upon this generation’s consumer Internet companies necessitated a redesign of applications and their underlying systems, but scale is only part of the explanation. Rather, the wholesale changes seen at the infrastructure and code levels and across the software development lifecycle were born out of the fundamental desire to win, which ultimately comes down to delivering the best software to millions (or billions) of end-users fastest.</p>
<p>Scalability is top-of-mind, but just as important is creating organizational and software development structures that support innovation, agility and resilience. After all, I would argue that Facebook became Facebook because Zuck was maniacal about 1) maintaining hacker culture to buoy innovation which enabled the company to bring superior software to market faster than the competition and 2) eliminating downtime which he knew would be a growth killer. Without this focus on agility and resilience, Facebook’s ability to scale would be moot.</p>
<p>As enterprise IT has been consumerized, the lessons learned by the IT pros at places like Twitter and AirBnB have made their way to the Fortune 2000. And while enterprise apps don’t necessarily need to scale to even hundreds of thousands of users, business agility and risk mitigation are always top-of-mind strategic initiatives for CIOs. It follows that as every organization becomes a software organization, competitive advantage will be characterized by companies’ ability to innovate, bring product to market faster and navigate risk.</p>
<p>So, how and why does this relate to the adoption microservices in the enterprise?</p>
<p>To level set, microservices implies an architectural choice to build and deploy applications as suites of discreet, modular services, each running its own process with a minimal amount of centralized management. Microservices encourage devs to decouple software into smaller, functional components with the expectation that they fail but don’t bring down the entire app. This, at least in theory, results in applications that are highly available, faster to build and easier to maintain. And consequently, adopting this architectural paradigm enables organizations of all sizes to innovate faster and mitigate risk. To fully appreciate this, it’s helpful understand how enterprise applications have been traditionally built and deployed and why and how this has evolved.</p>
<p><strong>The Challenge of the Monolith</strong></p>
<p>Enterprise app architecture hasn’t fundamentally changed for decades. Most apps are built using the three-tier model which became the dominant methodology in the client/server era. The idea is to split applications into independent, functional code bases consisting of the front-end (presentation tier), the back-end (logic tier) and data storage (data tier). See below for more details:</p>
<p><img src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/55241660ecad04887ffc827d-890-795/3teir.png" border="0" alt="3teir">&nbsp;</p>
<p>However, there’s a common saying that goes something like, “every successful application is an architectural nightmare.” Problems arise when systems become too big and unwieldy. The reason being that as the application grows and features, integrations, etc. are added, it’s not uncommon for the code base to balloon to millions of lines of code.</p>
<p>There’s nothing inherently flawed with this; far from it. However, in a today’s world where scalability is table stakes and new releases are expected weekly or daily, managing these giant monoliths becomes a…nightmare. Any change, no matter how tiny, to any module requires rebuilding and testing the entire application. This, in turn, creates downtime, which we know is a killer. Moreover, because the functional components of the application are packaged together as a single unit, the only way to respond to changing levels in user demand is to scale the entire application; another giant headache.</p>
<p>Enter microservices…</p>
<p><strong>The Promise of Microservices</strong></p>
<p>The concept of building applications as series of composable, modular services is nothing new, dating back as far as the first UNIX operating systems. However, two more recent phenomena explain the uptick in adoption.</p>
<p>First is the ascension of open source software and the corresponding comfort of devs integrating external libraries and APIs into their applications. Second is the rise of containers – namely Docker – which offer a light-weight form of virtualization making applications fast and portable across infrastructure. The beauty of containers lies in this portability and the idea of “code once, run anywhere.” Because containers hold the application logic and all of its dependencies, running as an isolated process, they execute the same in any environment. This creates parity between dev and production, and enables developers to confidently break up apps into discreet chunks knowing they’ll run the same from their terminal to test to production. Suffice to say, containers have been a key enabler of microservices adoption.</p>
<p>You can see from the chart below that interest in microservices has grown in lock-step with interest in containers.</p>
<p><img src="http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/552416b469bedd3146fc827d-1200-750/4graph.png" border="0" alt="4graph" style="line-height: 1.5em;"></p>
<p>A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit with Mike Bryzek, co-founder and CTO of Gilt. Mike and his team are one of the most forward-looking technical organizations in the world, let alone New York. They were early adopters of continuous delivery methods and were successfully using Docker containers in production almost a year before Docker released v1.0. Today, Gilt’s platform is composed of over 400 unique applications, spanning the gamut from pure RESTful APIs to full stack databases and applications.</p>
<p>The primary goal of this massive technical transformation was to become a product-centric, developer-driven organization. To do so meant to enable individual tech teams across Gilt to drive innovation as quickly as possible, providing isolation for each team which, in turn, enabled safe iteration. Further, Mike characterized the shift to microservices as enabling three organizational initiatives:</p>
<p>1. Growth – Innovation drives growth; organizations should strive to maximize opportunities to innovate. Microservices enabled Gilt to create self-contained teams that are responsible for their discreet application. Test and QA are performed within each team who then also determines release cycles, thereby owning the end-to-end product experience. This sense of ownership, in turn, drives quicker decision making and higher levels of innovation. Finally, empowering developers has proven to be a key selling point in attracting top technical talent.</p>
<p>2. Agility – Gilt’s platform is composed of 400+ independent services, implying the organization can release and respond to bugs and feature requests faster.</p>
<p>3. Risk – Gilt characterizes the expected cost of risk as follows:</p>
<p>R = Probability(bad event) * Cost(bad event) * Duration(bad event) where bad event means anything degrading the customer experience. Microservices, if designed properly, provide significant isolation. As a result applications are built such that any and all dependencies between services are remote with the expectation that dependencies will fail. Whereas in a monolith a bug can bring down the whole app (“cascading failure”), in a microservices architecture only the compromised service goes down. As a result “bad events” are not so bad, so risk “R” is minimized.</p>
<p>There are advantages to adopting microservices in your organization that go far beyond scale, but let’s be clear: microservices are not a panacea for all that ails your software org and come with added complexity. Instead of managing across three or four tiers and, you’ll have dozens or hundreds of disparate services to build, test, deploy and run, likely in polyglot languages and environments. This creates significant operational and technical overhead.</p>
<p>From an investor’s standpoint however, this also creates immense opportunity. Microservices represents not only a shift at the code and infrastructure levels of how software is designed and deployed, but also an organizational shift in how software development pipelines are constructed and managed. Therefore we’re likely to see not only a new set of tools to manage applications through dev, test and production, but also a new organizational tool kit for managing people and processes. In my mind, this trend promises to produce dozens, if not hundreds, of exciting new companies.</p>
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5em;">Lenny Pruss is a venture investor at RRE ventures. Follow him on Twitter at&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/lennypruss">@Lennypruss</a>.</em></p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/why-big-data-is-just-a-fad-2015-3" >Why big data is just a fad</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-case-for-microservices-in-the-enterprise-2015-4#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> <p>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/drunk-driving-checkpoint-regulation-hack-2015-2">A lawyer in Florida has come up with an ingenious way for drivers to evade drunken-driving checkpoints</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/how-developers-became-the-organizations-most-influential-power-brokers-2014-10How Developers Became The Organization's Most Influential Power Brokershttp://www.businessinsider.com/how-developers-became-the-organizations-most-influential-power-brokers-2014-10
Thu, 30 Oct 2014 15:32:30 -0400Lenny Pruss
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><img style="float:right;" src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/545282f56bb3f7892163f750-1200-924/helping-at-work-19.jpg" border="0" alt="Helping at work">In 2003 Nicholas Carr published a piece in the Harvard Business Review which famously promulgated&nbsp;</span><a href="http://hbr.org/2003/05/it-doesnt-matter/ar/1">IT doesn’t matter</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Carr predicted that as we leave a world defined by scarcity of IT resources and enter one where “the core functions of IT – data storage, data processing, and data transport – have become available and affordable to all,” technology will cease being a source of competitive advantage for businesses altogether. Many at the time believed Carr was forecasting the death of IT in the enterprise.</span></p>
<p>Sure enough, it took maybe 5-7 years to get to Carr’s dystopian reality as cloud, open source and mobile crushed barriers to innovation, distribution and adoption of IT. However, a funny thing has happened: instead of IT ceasing to matter it has become table stakes. With ubiquitous access to infrastructure, software and software development tools in particular, we’re seeing&nbsp;<a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460">software eat the world</a>.</p>
<p>As technology has shifted from enabler of business process, to enabler of product or service, to the very product or service itself, we’ve seen IT transform from a cost center that is adjunct to core business to a profit center that is its lifeblood.</p>
<p>It was during this transformation that the power dynamic within the workplace flipped from the c-suite to the basement; from the employees clad in Armani suits with tie clips to those wearing hoodies with sandals. Consequently, we’ve seen the developer become the most prized resource in the modern organization, and it is this trend that lends itself to an enormous investment opportunity.</p>
<p><strong>Devs as the Go-to-Market</strong></p>
<p>Developers are your&nbsp;<a href="http://www.chasminstitute.com/methodology/technologyadoptionlifecycle/tabid/89/default.aspx">innovators and early adopters</a>; they are the gatekeepers for new technologies and often decide which new tech succeeds and which fails either directly or indirectly (look no further than iOS and Windows – win the developer, win the platform war). Appropriately they have become the most powerful distribution channel for IT in the enterprise.</p>
<p>Devs often become catalysts for social communities which help spread new products and technologies organically, and their API-driven tools create the potential for powerful two-sided platforms. There are network effects to be taken advantage of here.</p>
<p>Moreover, the trend towards DevOps (and now BizDevOps) – characterized by the convergence of software development cycles and IT operations (and all business activities) – has effectively blurred the line between developer and sysadmin (and pretty much every other employee). Those tools which shrink developer time-to-value (aka time-to-code written) and offer frictionless onboarding, often multiply through the organization. From&nbsp;<a href="http://splunk.com/">Splunk</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://logentries.com/">Logentries</a>, to&nbsp;<a href="http://puppetlabs.com/">Puppet</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://getchef.com/">Chef</a>, to&nbsp;<a href="http://newrelic.com/">New Relic</a>, to&nbsp;<a href="http://mongodb.com/">Mongo</a>, to&nbsp;<a href="http://datadog.com/">Datadog</a>, we’re seeing the emergence of companies at every layer of the stack who succeed by winning the heart and mind of the developer.</p>
<p><strong>Devs as the End-Market</strong></p>
<p>There’s been a lot of talk about a renaissance in the dev tool market and it makes perfect sense: as dev teams become an organizational profit center the tools that make them more productive become that much more valuable.</p>
<p>The dev tool market is constantly evolving, but ultimately can be broken down into three categories which delineate the development lifecycle: writing code, testing code and running code. Within each of these segments we’re seeing companies who are fundamentally changing the way applications are built and shipped.</p>
<p>Tools from vendors like&nbsp;<a href="http://github.com/">GitHub</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://slack.com/">Slack</a>&nbsp;and upstarts like&nbsp;<a href="http://bowery.io/">Bowery</a>&nbsp;are helping devs write, manage and collaborate around code. Trends around continuous delivery and integration have compressed release cycles and made companies more agile and responsive to customers thanks to companies like&nbsp;<a href="https://circleci.com/">CircleCI</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://rainforestqa.com/">Rainforest</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="https://codeclimate.com/">CodeClimate</a>. Finally, the toolkit to ship and run code at scale is being reconstructed with the developer in mind. Infrastructure is becoming more open, more programmable and thus more developer-friendly. Products and platforms such as&nbsp;<a href="http://docker.com/">Docker</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://digitalocean.com/">Digital Ocean</a>&nbsp;are rethinking operations and infrastructure altogether with the developer at the center. Companies like&nbsp;<a href="http://flynn.io/">Flynn</a>&nbsp;are even further on the bleeding edge, trying to wholly productize the role of ops teams. &nbsp;All of this implies that devs don’t have to mess with config files or worry about provisioning servers and databases and can just focus on their code, knowing their app will run and scale in any environment.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">We’ve heard incessantly for the last several years about how the enterprise is being consumerized; how business apps are all about beautiful UX/UI, how BYOD and BYOA have broken down the corporate perimeter and how the procurer of IT is the end-user. What we haven’t heard much about is how the developer has become the biggest power broker in this new paradigm.</span></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/how-developers-became-the-organizations-most-influential-power-brokers-2014-10#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/rre-raises-280-million-6th-fund-2014-4Makerbot And BuzzFeed Investor RRE Raised A New $280 Million Fund In Less Than 6 Weekshttp://www.businessinsider.com/rre-raises-280-million-6th-fund-2014-4
Mon, 28 Apr 2014 16:09:00 -0400Alyson Shontell
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/526570ddeab8ea9a07ccecea-480-400/rre-ventures-1.jpg" border="0" alt="RRE Ventures" /></p><p>New York venture capital firm RRE has raised a $280 million sixth fund.</p>
<p>The firm, which was founded in 1994, has invested in startups such as OnDeck Capital, a small business lending company that is worth nearly $1 billion, WHIPTAIL, which was acquired by Cisco for $415 million, and Makerbot, which was acquired for nearly $604 million. Other investments include Sailthru, BuzzFeed, BarkBox and Business Insider.</p>
<p>RRE co-founder Stuart Ellman says the fundraising process took less than six weeks. Firm partner Jay Hass says RRE's fifth fund, which was raised in 2011, had a 59% internal rate of return, which encouraged LPs to reinvest.</p>
<p>Ellman and Hass say finding and investing in New York-Metropolitan startups is part of their core investment thesis. But not everyone is hot on New York startups.&nbsp;</p>
<p>In a recent interview with Business Insider, New York-based investor Fred Wilson said he felt the New York startup scene was exciting now than in years past. The New York Times' Jenna Wortham wrote that the east coast tech scene still <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/28/business/still-starting-up.html">lags behind Silicon Valley</a>.</p>
<p>"<span>No New York start-up has been a breakout hit, the sort of blockbuster with a multibillion-dollar valuation that has become so commonplace in Silicon Valley," Wortham writes.</span></p>
<p>Still, Hass and Ellman are bullish on New York startups. They've been investing in them for 20 years and they'll continue to do so.</p>
<p>"I think our fundraise demonstrates that our New York thesis is proving out in a material way," Hass told Business Insider.</p>
<p>"We're both proud and humbled by what New York startups have been able to achieve," added Ellman. "We think the best is yet to come."</p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/rre-raises-280-million-6th-fund-2014-4#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-break-into-the-app-store-top-10-2013-10How We Got Our App Into The App Store's Top 10, Even After A 'Soft Launch'http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-break-into-the-app-store-top-10-2013-10
Fri, 18 Oct 2013 11:45:00 -0400Stuart Ellman
<p><img src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/5231c4cb6bb3f7da330768a2-800-/incubating%20a%20company%20graphic_03.jpg" border="0" alt="Incubating a Company Graphic_03" width="800" /></p><p></p>
<p><em>This post is Part V in a series of articles about incubating a company. See Part IV: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/incubating-a-company-part-iv-2013-9">The Secret To A Great App: Make It Simple</a>.&nbsp;</em></p>
<p>Being featured by Apple in the App Store can be company-making; rising to the top of the charts can create a virtuous cycle of downloads and viral distribution.</p>
<p>Given this dynamic, most companies launch with a large paid advertising push and public relations blitz in order to kick-start this cycle. The Shake Board found this strategy to be a poor fit for our needs. We believed that we needed to continue to refine the product through more beta testing with a larger user base than 100 users that the App Store trial period allows. We knew this was far too small a sample to be confident of scalable product-market-fit.</p>
<p>While a &ldquo;soft&rdquo; launch would us to find bugs and test the product, the UI, and the advertising campaigns, it came with the risk that our intentionally moderate user growth could jeopardize getting featured by Apple who highlights only Apps they feel are extremely interesting or novel.</p>
<p>So, we struggled with the question: do we do the industry standard version of a &ldquo;real&rdquo; launch or take the risk of a &ldquo;soft&rdquo; launch in order to perfect the product? After a lively (to say the least) board discussion, we decided to go for a soft launch. We believed that a great product stands on its own and that we needed to test and iterate on the product in a lower risk environment to ensure it was truly ready for prime time.</p>
<p>The soft launch approach also provided a unique opportunity to establish an organic installation rate against which we could measure the effectiveness of our upcoming advertising campaigns. During the soft launch, we entered a &lsquo;quiet period&rsquo; where we did zero advertising or marketing. The product was live in the App Store, but potential customers needed to use the right search terms or browse pretty deeply within the Productivity section to find us. We didn&rsquo;t get a ton of installs, but with hundreds of thousands of Apps and a name that only hints at legal functionality, this was no surprise.</p>
<p>With our baseline level of installs set and our product finely tuned, we began to roll out our user acquisition strategy. For most companies, keyword advertising is the place to start. Google Adwords has made reaching customers easy. We turned on a few campaigns, bid on relevant legal terms, and waited eagerly for the results. Initial CPAs came in at a shockingly high $27 per user! Legal keywords are incredibly expensive since you are bidding against law firms soliciting clients for multi-billion dollar class action suits or multi-million dollar personal injury suits. It was clear from this simple test that bidding on legal keywords was not a sustainable user acquisition strategy for a free, mobile-first legal startup. While this wasn't a sustainable model for acquisition, it did help us test as copy and continue honing the way we communicated our value proposition.</p>
<p>Next, we turned our attention to testing social channels, exclusively targeting mobile users (with the exception of Linkedin which doesn&rsquo;t allow you to specify web vs. mobile on their ad platform). As we launched new social campaigns, we knew that we couldn&rsquo;t compete directly for legal keywords in a cost-effective way, so we targeted our core customer demographic of freelancers, startup founders, and SMB managers through interest and profile attributes such as &ldquo;Graphic Design&rdquo;, &ldquo;Freelance&rdquo;, and &ldquo;Entrepreneurship." Of all the social channels, Facebook yielded both the highest number of clicks and the highest install rate at the lowest CPA. User acquisition costs were now in the low single digits, sometimes below $1/install which felt much more sustainable.</p>
<p>As we neared our planned, &lsquo;go live&rsquo; date when we would officially launch a press campaign, we were lucky enough to be featured in the App Store&rsquo;s Productivity and Business sections. Abe and his team had spent a lot of time working with the Apple App Store team to secure this spot, emphasizing that out of the hundreds of thousands of apps there was not a single mobile-only legal tool. Being featured became an incredible opportunity to stand out at a time when we knew our product was ready for large-scale adoption.</p>
<p>To our delight, Shake rocketed towards the top of the charts in the App Store. #12&hellip;then #8&hellip;#7&hellip;.#6. I followed the ranking by checking the App Store roughly every five minutes, day and night. We peaked at #6 and held there for a few days, but gained no new ground. Although we started to pour in marketing dollars to drive up installs, we were about two days late and missed the chance to sustain the momentum and download rate necessary to keep us in the Top 10. Although we had a tremendously successful launch, we learned a lesson about being prepared to pour gas on the fire while it&rsquo;s still roaring.</p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-break-into-the-app-store-top-10-2013-10#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/barkbox-adds-media-maven-and-dog-parent-cathie-black-to-its-board-2013-10BarkBox Adds Media-Maven and 'Dog Parent' Cathie Black To Its Boardhttp://www.businessinsider.com/barkbox-adds-media-maven-and-dog-parent-cathie-black-to-its-board-2013-10
Mon, 14 Oct 2013 11:59:00 -0400Jillian D'Onfro
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/525bf8586bb3f79f51482b76-480-/cathie-black-2.jpg" border="0" alt="Cathie-Black" width="480" /></p><p>Monthly dog treat-and-toy delivery service <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/barkbox-revenue-and-barkcare-2013-6" target="_blank">BarkBox</a> just named the longtime Hearst president Cathie Black to its board of advisors.&nbsp;</p>
<p>BarkBox co-founder Matt Meeker connected with Black last summer at an investor meeting of venture capital firm RRE. Meeker's presentation convinced Black, a senior advisor at RRE, to take on a more significant role with the company.</p>
<p>Black told Business Insider that because of her experience &mdash; she served as chairman of Hearst Magazine, president of Hearst Corporations, and publisher of USA Today &mdash; she has the marketing and subscription-service understanding to make her a great mentor for the company.</p>
<p>"And I'm a dog parent," Black says, making the BarkBox-coined distinction from <em>dog owner.</em>"We are the people for whom nothing is too much for our dogs."</p>
<p>(Black owns a 4-year-old black lab named Madison; everyone who works at the company owns a pup.)</p>
<p>BarkBox offers dog lovers six-month subscriptions of treats at $19 per box, and the company recently launched two new services: BarkPost, a "Buzzfeed for dogs" website that has over 400,000 monthly visitors, and a 24/7 vet consulting service called BarkCare. The company has grown tenfold since 2012, and has nearly 100,000 BarkBox subscribers and a revenue run rate of $25 million.</p>
<p>But BarkBox isn't the only company Black is currently involved in. She launched herself into the startup space after a <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/cathie-black-fired-schools-chancellor-2011-4" target="_blank">short stint</a> as chancellor of the New York City school district. She invests in or advises half a dozen companies, including YieldBot, Zuse, the Daily Muse, and, now, BarkBox.</p>
<p>Black is also a member of Golden Seeds, a member-organization that mentors, develops, and invests in women-owned companies, and feels strongly about helping women score venture capital funding.The New York Times recently included her on&nbsp;<a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/08/a-woman-to-serve-on-twitters-board-here-are-25/?_r=1" target="_blank">a list</a> of potential women for Twitter's <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/dick-costolo-just-called-this-critic-of-his-all-male-all-white-board-the-carrot-top-of-academic-sources-2013-10" target="_blank">all-male board</a>, though her plate is plenty full as is.</p>
<p>"It's great to be around all these young entrepreneurs," Black says. "It's very intellectually engaging, it's fun, and being able to use my contacts, where appropriate, makes me feel like I'm doing something really worthwhile to help these businesses get started."</p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/barkbox-adds-media-maven-and-dog-parent-cathie-black-to-its-board-2013-10#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/incubating-a-company-part-2-2013-9VCs: This Is How To Make Sure The Company You're Incubating Will Actually Survive On The Markethttp://www.businessinsider.com/incubating-a-company-part-2-2013-9
Thu, 19 Sep 2013 14:45:00 -0400Stuart Ellman
<p dir="ltr"><span><img src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/5231c4cb6bb3f7da330768a2-800-/incubating%20a%20company%20graphic_03.jpg" border="0" alt="Incubating a Company Graphic_03" width="800" /></span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span><em>This post is Part II in a series of articles about incubating a company. See Part I:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/lessons-for-incubating-a-company-2013-9">I Just Incubated A Company &mdash; It's The Most Interesting Thing I Do As A Venture Capitalist</a></em><span><br /></span></span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>When analyzing a market, it is important to identify ongoing trends and to search out companies capitalizing on them. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Recently, we&rsquo;ve seen huge increases in P2P commerce as well as a significant expansion in the freelance economy, with one in six American workers projected to be freelancers by 2020. As transactions of physical goods, services, and intellectual property between peers become more prevalent, the need for simple, convenient, binding agreements has increased dramatically. &nbsp;</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">With the rise of the collaborative economy, individuals want and need to protect themselves when transacting. At the same time, people want to transact quickly and are no longer willing to spend significant amounts of time and money on the legal process. In a world where the only options sometimes seem to be foregoing legal documentation and risking future disputes or resorting to overly complex and expensive legal solutions which yield agreements neither party can understand, </span><a href="http://www.shakelaw.com/" target="_blank">Shake</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> clearly offered a much-needed solution.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So we started to dig into the market, and the more we learned, the more excited we became. We surveyed all of the RRE portfolio companies and saw a real need for simplified legal documents. We also did broad market research and discovered that in the US alone, there are twenty-eight million small businesses, and forty-two million freelancers (up from six million in 2007). While a variety of low-cost online legal service providers existed, we felt that most of them focused mainly on physical printouts of legal documents and/or busy online forms that didn&rsquo;t address the problem of confusing legalese. Additionally, it seemed that many legal startups were attempting to replace lawyers. Shake is doing something very different. &nbsp;</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Rather than trying to replace lawyers, a goal we found unrealistic, we saw Shake as simplifying only those legal documents that require little personalization but are still critically important. &nbsp;We believed that startups would still require lawyers for many of their legal needs: incorporation, fund raising, debt, etc, but not for all of them. &nbsp;By focusing on supplementing existing legal services with a fast, cost-efficient solution for simple, routine agreements, we felt strongly that Shake could completely change the way that agreements are reached and formalized while also providing an obvious benefit and value proposition to users.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Our next step was to dig into the details of what our customers needed and to understand how those needs will change going forward. &nbsp;We spoke to startups about their everyday legal document needs (NDA&rsquo;s, Consulting Agreements, Bill of Sales, etc.), and we kept getting the same answers: either startups took a significant risk and did not document these transactions at all or they called their lawyers and received a boilerplate document for which they felt they were overcharged. When we spoke to some junior lawyers they admitted that a lot of what they do is cutting and pasting names into document templates on behalf of their clients (or instructing their clients to do it on their own). &nbsp;</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Of course, we were only focusing on simple documents. &nbsp;With the number of US small businesses on the rise, and the number of US freelancers expected to reach sixty million by 2020, we felt comfortable that the need for such documents already existed, and would only increase in the coming years. Shake is not incorporating companies or filing patents, services for which we feel lawyers are both useful and necessary. We&rsquo;re merely streamlining a simple, yet costly, documentation process that already exists. &nbsp;Moreover, we decided to focus first on the five documents that fit the most pressing needs of those freelancers and startups we initially surveyed: NDA&rsquo;s, Bill of Sale, Consulting Agreements, Rental Agreements and Loan Agreements (money).</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And as an investor, I love </span><a href="http://www.shakelaw.com/" target="_blank">Shake</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> because the company is solving a problem which affects a large--and growing--number of people: how best to transact, simply and without disputes. But ultimately, I believe in Shake not only as a VC with over twenty years&rsquo; experience, but also as an individual with a use for the product. Although incredibly useful for VCs and startups, Shake solutions are not intended only for those starting or funding tech companies. America is experiencing an unprecedented trend towards freelance work, and Americans are increasingly interested in working for themselves, and transacting with their peers. I quickly became confident that Shake was offering not only a great solution, but a timely one.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">OK, the market passes the sniff test. &nbsp;Next, deciding how much to invest to get the company to it&rsquo;s next milestone. &nbsp;</span></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/incubating-a-company-part-2-2013-9#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/lessons-for-incubating-a-company-2013-9I Just Incubated A Company — It's The Most Interesting Thing I Do As A Venture Capitalisthttp://www.businessinsider.com/lessons-for-incubating-a-company-2013-9
Thu, 12 Sep 2013 11:43:00 -0400Stuart Ellman
<p dir="ltr"><span><img src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/5231c4cb6bb3f7da330768a2-800-/incubating%20a%20company%20graphic_03.jpg" border="0" alt="Incubating a Company Graphic_03" width="800" />Incubating a company is one of the most interesting things that I do as a venture capitalist. It&rsquo;s not only a lot of fun, it also puts me in the entrepreneur&rsquo;s shoes which gives me perspective on how to provide the right kind of support and advice for my portfolio companies.</span><span></span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Every few years, I see a great opportunity that no company is addressing and I help assemble a team to charge headlong into the market. This year, I incubated a company called Shake which creates concise, plain English, legally binding agreements on your mobile phone. I learn so much from the process of incubating companies that I decided to write a short series for Business Insider about the experience in order to help potential entrepreneurs understand the events that go on inside a startup that hopefully lead to that moment when after months of research and soul-searching, the co-founders look around the table at each other and say, &ldquo;let&rsquo;s do this.&rdquo;</span><span></span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The idea for Shake was the brainchild of Jon Steinberg, a long- time friend and the President of BuzzFeed (an RRE portfolio company) and Jared Grusd, the General Counsel for Spotify and an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School where I have taught a Venture Capital Seminar for over 10 years. Jon and Jared sat in my offices and told me that they thought they had a great idea but weren&rsquo;t sure what to do with it.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span><img src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/5231f3d7ecad045113270814-1133-572/shake_screens.jpg" border="0" alt="shake iphone app" width="800" /></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Jon and Jared met at Google in the mid 2000s where they worked on lots of negotiations together. They were frustrated that the complexity of the legal documents often got in the way of deals that had strong commercial benefits, especially when dealing with SMBs who didn&rsquo;t have access to expensive legal counsel. The legal documents were simply too convoluted to get deals done without endless rounds of edits and discussions. Working together, Jon and Jared cut out all the extraneous &ldquo;legalese&rdquo; and found that two page documents were&nbsp;more efficient, more easily understood, yet equally binding. It was just a better way of doing business.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Since working at Google, both had moved on to senior roles at great companies where they were personally and professionally satisfied. Neither had the time to start a new company in addition to their day jobs, but both of them saw a real opportunity. Startup companies, freelancers, and most people participating in the collaborative economy needed basic legal documents like NDA&rsquo;s, loan agreements, consulting agreements, and bills of sale. Most of these needs are perfectly satisfied with boilerplate documents, yet lawyers still charge significant sums to customize these highly standardized agreements. Why not offer simple, legally binding documents, available over a mobile app, instantly executable and available for free? The goal was not to replace lawyers, but to provide a fast, cost efficient supplement for less complicated, routine agreements.</span><span></span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Every year that I have taught at Columbia, there are one or two truly excellent students that I know I want to get involved with, either as a VC or an entrepreneur. When Jon and Jared approached me, I was finishing up another year of teaching and one of my students, Abe Geiger, really stood out to me; I just knew this guy was going to do something special. Coincidentally, Abe had been working on a legal tech idea of his own &mdash; simplifying the fund formation process for Private Equity, VC, and Hedge Funds &mdash; and was highly interested in</span><span> </span><span>the consumer driven enterprise (Dropbox, Evernote, Google Apps, etc.) as well as collaborative consumption trends (Airbnb, Taskrabbit, etc.).</span><span></span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>After working on the fund formation idea for a while, he realized that impacting change in the legal industry wasn&rsquo;t going to happen from the top down, and it needed to happen from the bottom up. So when I told Abe about the opportunity I was considering with Jon and Jared, he said he would be very interested in co-founding Shake with us. He also believed the industry&rsquo;s raw size, extreme inefficiency and lack of transparency made for the ideal disruptive conditions. We all shared the same vision and philosophy for approaching this opportunity, something that is critical amongst a founding team.</span><span></span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The more we learned about the market, the more excited we became. We surveyed all of the RRE portfolio companies and saw a real need for simple documents and a better way to customize and manage them. When we looked at the competitive landscape we saw online DIY providers putting confusing legalese online without a mobile presence, and mobile signature products with no content. With a great entrepreneur, an interesting space, a big market opportunity, Shake had the makings of a great venture investment. &nbsp;Next we needed to really dig into the market and the competition.</span><span></span></p>
<p><em><span id="docs-internal-guid-7472b8e6-1265-8319-0fc3-605bac6032be">Stuart Ellman is a founding General Partner of RRE Ventures. He also serves as a board member of Shake, a mobile application that allows you to create, sign and send legally binding agreements in seconds.</span></em></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/lessons-for-incubating-a-company-2013-9#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/rre-investor-adam-ludwin-and-devon-gundry-launch-albumatic-2013-2RRE Investor Adam Ludwin Has Decided To Start A Company, Albumatic, In The Most Crowded Space Everhttp://www.businessinsider.com/rre-investor-adam-ludwin-and-devon-gundry-launch-albumatic-2013-2
Thu, 21 Feb 2013 12:12:00 -0500Alyson Shontell
<p class="p1"><img style="float:right;" src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/5126339a6bb3f7637f00000c-400-/albumatic-adam-ludwin-devon-gundry.jpeg" border="0" alt="albumatic adam ludwin Devon Gundry" width="400" /></p><p>Adam Ludwin sees a lot of startups as a principal at RRE, a venture capital firm that's invested in companies like Moda Operandi, Makerbot, Braintree and <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/business-insider">Business Insider</a>.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">As such, he sees broad trends in entrepreneurship; he knows what every founder is working on, which spaces are the most crowded, and which types of startups investors are looking to financially back.</p>
<p class="p1">Two of the biggest trends right now are:&nbsp;</p>
<ul>
<li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>Social photo and video apps</strong> -- Think Viddy, SocialCam, Cinemagram and Snapchat. All emerged as <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/instagram">Instagram</a> was getting acquired for $1 billion and Pinterest was receiving a billion-dollar valuation.</span></li>
<li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>Reinventing the <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/iphone">iPhone</a>'s default apps</strong> -- I<span>nstagram re-invented the Camera app and found success. <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/spotify">Spotify</a> is often used instead of Apple's "Music." <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/evernote">Evernote</a> is a good alternative to "Notes," the new Mailbox app is preferred to "Mail" and apps like Sunrise and Fantastical are better than "Calendar."</span></span></li>
</ul>
<p class="p1">Ludwin founded two companies prior to joining RRE, and now he's trying his hand at another one. He's co-founding an iPhone app with a friend from Los Angeles, Devon Gundry.</p>
<p class="p1">And guess what?&nbsp;</p>
<ul>
<li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It's a social photo app called <a href="https://bitly.com/WbwBij">Albumatic</a></span></li>
<li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It's trying to smother one of Apple's default apps, "Photos."</span></li>
</ul>
<p class="p1">"I really don't want to like another photo app," I told Ludwin as I looked at the app. He laughed and said, "Neither do I."</p>
<p class="p1">But as I stalked recent photos of CrunchFund's MG Siegler on a trip to Cabo with his girlfriend, I found myself warming to Albumatic.</p>
<p class="p1">Albumatic is a social, beautifully-designed alternative to Apple's "Photos," an album app most people forget they have on their iPhones. <span>Ludwin calls Albumatic an "organizational layer" for photos, separating them by event, location, and featured people.</span></p>
<p class="p1">"There were seven or eight of us all taking photos of Devon's new baby," Ludwin explained Albumatic's origins. "All together we had taken 100 photos, but they were all siloed in each others' devices. There are endless places to share photos -- via text message, <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/facebook">Facebook</a>, Instagram, and Twitter -- but there's no good, social way to bulk combine camera rolls and image galleries."</p>
<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">When you join Albumatic, it helps you find other users on Facebook, in your contact list, or nearby via the iPhone's GPS.&nbsp;</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">From then on, when you and a friend are near each other, you can create and join albums together. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">No invites codes are sent back and forth; friends see albums as you create them through push notifications, and they can either "watch" it if they aren't nearby, or they can join the album if they're witnessing the same event. Like Instagram, people can favorite or comment on photos.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><img src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/51263e7becad041723000045-640-1136/ss5.png" border="0" alt="albumatic" width="590" /></p>
<p class="p1"><span>Like Path and Foursquare, each user has a profile page that displays their albums, photos and activity. Here's what it looks like:</span></p>
<p class="p1"><img src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/51263e46ecad043e2100005e-640-1136/ss4.png" border="0" alt="albumatic" width="590" /></p>
<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Only your friends can watch/subscribe to your albums, so strangers won't be able to creep into them (I was only able to "watch" photos of MG's trip to Cabo because Ludwin is friends with him. I wouldn't have been able to do that on my version of the app).</span></p>
<p class="p1">Albumatic could be good if you want to witness a friend's spring break trip you can't make, or a wedding you weren't invited to. Subscribing to an album is like being there in spirit, and you can watch the event unfold in real-time without having to wait for Facebook uploads after the fact.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">It's also good for weddings you <em>are</em> invited to, where every friend has a camera and is snapping their own shots. Instead of uploading and tagging each camera roll separately on Facebook, you can join forces and see everyone's photos at once on Albumatic.</p>
<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Here's what the album view looks like in the app:</span></p>
<p class="p1"><img src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/512639bf69bedd3046000037-640-1136/ss1.png" border="0" alt="albumatic 1" width="590" /></p>
<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">One problem with Albumatic is, if events are too big (think South by Southwest), it's possible to have too many people join a single album. If a bunch of friends of friends of friends are at a concert or event together, they could all end up joining the same album and contribute thousands of photos that the album creator never cared to see.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Ludwin calls this idea "album hijacking" and admits it could be a problem. He and Gundry have contemplated capping the number of people who can join albums. He says Siegler has already hijacked one of his from a San Francisco trip.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><em><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Here's a view of all the people that have joined or watched an album:</span></em></p>
<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><img src="http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/51263c9069bedd674e000024-640-1136/ss3.png" border="0" alt="albumatic" width="590" /><br /></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Also, there's no way to remove or "untag" a photo of you once it's in Albumatic, and anyone who's subscribed to the album can see it. Ludwin says the only current solution is to ask the poster to take down the image.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><em><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Here's what the group camera roll looks like in Albumatic:</span></em></p>
<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><img src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/51263d30eab8ea4912000008-640-1136/ss2.png" border="0" alt="albumatic" width="590" /></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">For now, Ludwin will remain at RRE and involved in companies where he's on the board: <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/howaboutwe">HowAboutWe</a>, Moda Operandi, <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/kik-interactive">Kik Interactive</a>, <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/paperless-post">Paperless Post</a> and VYou. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">RRE will also be investing in Albumatic, although a round of financing hasn't closed yet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Ludwin realizes photo-sharing is a packed space, but after months of mulling it over and researching Albumatic's competitors, he's confident in his startup. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">When asked why he picked such a crowded space he replied,&nbsp;</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">"</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Simple: the problem was still unsolved!"</span></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/rre-investor-adam-ludwin-and-devon-gundry-launch-albumatic-2013-2#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/hey-enterprise-startups-you-should-move-to-new-york-2012-5Hey, Enterprise Startups, You Should Move To New Yorkhttp://www.businessinsider.com/hey-enterprise-startups-you-should-move-to-new-york-2012-5
Wed, 09 May 2012 14:50:00 -0400Stuart Ellman
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/4f9d8048ecad04f07c000010-400-/soho-crowd-new-york-city.jpg" border="0" alt="Soho, crowd, New York City " width="400" /></p><p>I recently read the article &ldquo;<a href="http://read.bi/IIvpkh">17 Enterprise Startups to Bet Your Career On</a>&rdquo; in <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/business-insider" class="hidden_link">Business Insider</a>. &nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>As a longtime enterprise investor, I was happy to see more attention being paid to this major area of venture, but a little disappointed in one dimension of the article. &nbsp;</p>
<p>For the last couple of years we&rsquo;ve been paying an increasingly large share of attention to the &nbsp;enterprise and companies who sell to them. &nbsp;&nbsp;<br /><br />While much of our industry has been quite focused on social media or local deals, I noticed what is happening in the enterprise markets. &nbsp;I look at some of the deals we did almost a decade ago and have seen what has happened to their valuation. Concur is trading at over $3 billion. Broadsoft went public last year and has been trading around the billion dollar mark. &nbsp;Proofpoint and Vocera just went public. Taleo was acquired for $1.9 billion by <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/oracle" class="hidden_link">Oracle</a>. These aren&rsquo;t the world&rsquo;s sexiest businesses (although Vocera&rsquo;s product is reminiscent of Star Trek) but they make money and have been great investments.<br /><br />Why are the large bulk of the enterprise startups highlighted in the article based in Silicon Valley? &nbsp;New York has become a startup phenomenon for a variety of reasons, all of which are applicable to enterprise startups.<br /><br /><strong>Closer to Customers</strong><br />If you are selling an enterprise solution to the Fortune 500, whether it is ERP, CRM or Security, . &nbsp;New York has 45 of the Fortune 500 companies located here, more than twice the number of our closest competitor, Houston. &nbsp;As a point of reference, San Francisco has 8. &nbsp;Being close to your customer means understanding what their needs are and, for the first few implementations, being available to fix and adjust the software. &nbsp;<br /><br /><strong>Experienced CEOs Available</strong><br />A big stumbling block used to be the number of battle tested startup CEOs available. &nbsp;After more than a decade of Silicon Alley startups, NY has a plethora of excellent startup CEO&rsquo;s, many of whom have made it through two or more startup experiences. &nbsp;In addition, we also have <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/ibm" class="hidden_link">IBM</a>, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/ca" class="hidden_link">CA</a> and a number of other employers who have been known to sell a piece of enterprise software.<br /><br /><strong>Tech Talent Available</strong><br />Not a problem. With hundreds of thousands of programmers from <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/google" class="hidden_link">Google</a>, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/microsoft" class="hidden_link">Microsoft</a>, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/facebook" class="hidden_link">Facebook</a>, Ebay plus all of the talent from the startups, Techstars, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/betaworks" class="hidden_link">Betaworks</a>, and the other incubators/accelerators, an enterprise startup is in good shape. In addition Columbia Engineering is doing a great job and Roosevelt Island will soon be filled up with Cornell/Technion students. &nbsp;There will be plenty to go around.<br /><br /><strong>Cloud</strong><br />Any old issues of not enough servers or hardware has been taken care of by the cloud. &nbsp;Nothing more needs to be said.<br /><br /><strong>VC Available</strong><br />It used to be that people started up companies in the valley because that is where the VC&rsquo;s were. &nbsp;Not anymore. &nbsp;USV, IA, DFJ, Firstmark; a bunch of the Boston guys (<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/matrix" class="hidden_link">Matrix</a>, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/polaris" class="hidden_link">Polaris</a>, Flybridge) and some from the valley (Accel and KP) are all here. We at RRE have always been here. And are investing aggressively out of our new fund. We welcome enterprise startups. I am happy to announce right here, if you are a NYC enterprise company, please send me the deal.<br /><br />I am looking at some of the newest deals we have done in our Fund V. A bunch of them are selling to enterprises and growing rapidly, whether it&rsquo;s Whiptail and solid state storage arrays, Sailthru&rsquo;s personalized marketing technology or Yieldbot&rsquo;s big data ad platform. So, let&rsquo;s get Facebook public already. Then let&rsquo;s see the IPO&rsquo;s of Workday and <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/cloudera" class="hidden_link">Cloudera</a> come out. Time to get back to business, enterprise business.</p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/hey-enterprise-startups-you-should-move-to-new-york-2012-5#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/from-lolcats-to-occupy-wall-street-progress-is-happenning-from-the-bottom-up-2011-12From LOLcats To Occupy Wall Street, Everything Is Happening From The Bottom Up Nowhttp://www.businessinsider.com/from-lolcats-to-occupy-wall-street-progress-is-happenning-from-the-bottom-up-2011-12
Thu, 08 Dec 2011 18:17:00 -0500Adam Ludwin
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4ee0e588eab8eaed10000025/pepperspray-cop-constitution-founding-fathers.jpg" border="0" alt="Pepperspray cop constitution founding fathers" /></p><p>Is there any doubt about the nature of the moment we live in?&nbsp; We are passing through a period of global disruption and fermentation.&nbsp;</p>
<p>An age of volatility and risk. &nbsp;The&nbsp;bottoms-up, decentralized, and emergent is overtaking the top-down, centralized, and directed.</p>
<p>That much is probably obvious to anyone who&rsquo;s awake (not to mention the 20% of Americans with anxiety disorders).&nbsp;</p>
<p>What&rsquo;s less clear is what to make of it all.&nbsp; How do we define exactly what is going on?&nbsp; Change is happening everywhere, all the time.&nbsp; It is disrupting industries, unsettling governments, and shaking markets.&nbsp; Even those on the vanguard of movements like <a href="http://occupywallst.org/">OccupyWallSt</a> and the <a href="http://www.teapartypatriots.org/">Tea Party</a> struggle to articulate their goals, or perhaps more to the point, struggle to direct them at any particular source.</p>
<p>That&rsquo;s because the nature of this change is itself unprecedented.&nbsp; It is particular to our global, hyper-connected context.&nbsp; It is characterized by the inevitable and organic emergence of ideas at an incredibly high velocity that capture our collective imagination, take form, evolve, and remix in unexpected ways with the next idea.</p>
<p>In other words, we are entering the age of the meme.</p>
<p>You&rsquo;ve probably seen funny image memes like <a href="https://www.google.com/search?gcx=c&amp;q=lolcats&amp;um=1&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;hl=en&amp;tbm=isch&amp;source=og&amp;sa=N&amp;tab=wi&amp;ei=utfgTuu7NaXu0gGFi5HGBw&amp;biw=1438&amp;bih=779&amp;sei=vNfgTqaKF8bx0gGD_8ioBw">LOLcats</a>, <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/top/?sort=top&amp;t=all">rage comics</a>, the <a href="http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/y-u-no-guy">Y U NO guy</a>, <a href="http://sadkeanu.tumblr.com/">Sad Keanu</a>, or the <a href="http://memecreator.net/philosoraptor/">Philosoraptor</a>, especially if you frequent sites like <a href="http://www.reddit.com/">Reddit</a>, <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/">Buzzfeed</a>, <a href="http://www.9gag.com/">9GAG</a>,&nbsp;or <a href="http://icanhascheezburger.com/">Cheezburger</a>, though they are now spreading like wildfire through <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/facebook">Facebook</a>, <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/twitter">Twitter</a>, and good old-fashioned email.</p>
<p>Like all memes, humor memes are organic phenomena that are never finished but mutate and live on in new memes.&nbsp; Their emergence is certain, yet their particular form is unknowable in advance.&nbsp; For example, there will be a new, hilarious meme next week on Reddit, and no one yet knows what it will be.&nbsp; But it will emerge.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s why platforms like Cheezburger are so amazing:&nbsp; they facilitate the appearance of hits, but unlike <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/disney">Disney</a>, they don&rsquo;t have to invest in an idea and then hope that it works.&nbsp; It works first, which is why it emerges.</p>
<p>A particular meme gains prominence by beating out many other variations in a Darwinian battle for survival analogous to biological evolution.&nbsp; Richard Dawkins coined the term &ldquo;meme,&rdquo; <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene">in 1976</a>, with this in mind.&nbsp; As he noted then, memes are as old as culture, and began as oral histories, proverbs, and learned skills.&nbsp; Human beings serve as replicators, passing memes from one person to another, a process that has been enhanced over time by new tools and higher levels of connectivity.</p>
<p>But what&rsquo;s happening today is not simply an acceleration of an age-old cultural process.&nbsp; We have hit an inflection point.&nbsp; We are an always-on culture now.&nbsp; Social networks have reached critical mass.&nbsp; Inexpensive tools for creating and remixing content have been widely adopted.&nbsp; Our collective consciousness has come online.&nbsp; The intelligence in the system is now coming from below, not above.&nbsp; The sage on the stage is no more.</p>
<p>And our collective mind is pumping out memes that are shaping every conceivable domain.&nbsp; Humor is simply the tip of the spear.</p>
<h4>Here are a few examples.</h4>
<p><strong>Fashion.</strong>&nbsp; The top-down, designer-led, runway-to-rack paradigm was perhaps captured most famously in <em>The Devil Wears Prada</em> where fashion editor Miranda Priestly explains to Andrea that the blue sweater she believes she &ldquo;chose&rdquo; was in fact &ldquo;selected for [her] by the people in this room from a pile of stuff.&rdquo;</p>
<p>This began to change when companies like Inditex (Zara) implemented<a href="http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/4652.html"> demand-driven supply chains </a>and bloggers like <a href="http://www.thesartorialist.com/">The Sartorialist</a> started influencing brands with his street style photography featuring real people.</p>
<p>But that&rsquo;s nothing compared to what&rsquo;s beginning to happen.&nbsp; The best examples are found on <a href="http://pinterest.com/all/?category=women_apparel">Pinterest</a> and <a href="http://www.tumblr.com/spotlight/fashion">Tumblr</a>.&nbsp; Instead of simply serving to identify trends that inspire designers upstream, these platforms have achieved the velocity and volume necessary to bubble up entirely new ideas, or fashion memes.&nbsp; To be sure, a lot of the images on these sites today simply reflect and magnify designer choices from above, but an increasing share is of a different nature.&nbsp; For example, a meme might emerge when a girl in Stockholm finds a scarf in her grandmother&rsquo;s attic and posts a photo of herself wearing it on <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/tumblr">Tumblr</a>. &nbsp;From there, the scarf is re-blogged thousands of times, picked up on Pinterest and added to hundreds of style boards, and over time beats out thousands of other potential scarfs for prominence in the fashion zeitgeist.</p>
<p>I think there is a real opportunity to build new brands by identifying and producing apparel based on these fashion memes.&nbsp; The season-driven apparel cycle isn&rsquo;t going away tomorrow, but the reign of the runway is waning.</p>
<p><strong>Politics.</strong>&nbsp; Much has been written about the role of social networks in supporting movements like the Tea Party, OccupyWallSt, and the Arab Spring.</p>
<p>But these movements themselves can be understood as memes.&nbsp; As this <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/business/media/the-branding-of-the-occupy-movement.html?_r=1&amp;pagewanted=all">New York Times article</a> explains:</p>
<p style="margin-left: 0.5in;">On July 13, [Kalle Lasn] and his colleagues created a new hash tag on Twitter: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET. For some people they were just words and images. For Mr. Lasn, they were tools to begin remodeling the &ldquo;mental environment,&rdquo; to create a new &ldquo;meme.&rdquo;</p>
<p>No one knew in advance just what form a modern, anti-corporate movement would take; although many, including <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/fred-wilson">Fred Wilson</a>, <a href="http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/06/investing-in-the-cultural-revolution.html">predicted</a> that such a movement was inevitable.&nbsp; As with all memes, the particular form and timing was unknown in advance, but it was clear something would emerge from below and would be sweeping when it did.&nbsp; More are sure to follow.</p>
<p>As we enter campaign season, it is worth remembering that the iconic <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_%22Hope%22_poster">Obama Hope poster</a> was not created by the campaign, but by the artist Shepard Fairey to sell on the street.&nbsp; Only after it became a meme, because of the digital version that swirled around the web in various forms during the social network-driven campaign cycle of 2008, did the Obama campaign wisely commission an official version.&nbsp; What began as a street poster ended up in the Smithsonian&rsquo;s National Portrait Gallery because of its influence as a political meme.</p>
<p><strong>Music and Entertainment.</strong>&nbsp; As Kirby Ferguson explains so well in his fantastic series, <a href="http://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/">Everything is a Remix</a>, for decades artists have created popular music and movies by borrowing and remixing stories, sounds, and images.</p>
<p>But that process has been democratized thanks to <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/youtube">YouTube</a>.&nbsp; The result is one of the most prominent memes of all, the viral video: the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ">Rick Roll</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKoB0MHVBvM">Diet Coke and Mentos</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkCNJRfSZBU">Leeroy Jenkins</a>, and the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQSNhk5ICTI">Double Rainbow guy</a>, to name just a few.</p>
<p>Celebrities like Justin Bieber and Andy Samberg (not to mention Rebecca Black) owe their careers to YouTube, which is nothing if not a brutally Darwinian platform where, like on Cheezburger, hits are inevitable and driven by the collective response of the whole, not the taste-predicting abilities of an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_H._Hammond">A&amp;R man</a> or studio head.</p>
<p>Companies like <a href="http://smule.com/">Smule</a> are pushing things further still, putting simple and fun music creation tools in the hands of all.&nbsp; I think there remains a huge opportunity to be the platform that facilitates not just the emergence of hits, but also their creation.</p>
<p><strong>News and Information.</strong>&nbsp; A history professor of mine once remarked that if you divided the world in half and had one half of civilization live life as usual, and the other half write down everything they were witnessing, you would still struggle to adequately record every event.</p>
<p>Well, that was before Twitter.&nbsp; Twitter has become, among other things, a real-time record of the events unfolding in the world.&nbsp; What better example than <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/05/twitters-velocity-is-apparent.php">@ReallyVirtual&rsquo;s tweets</a> about the Osama Bin Laden raid as it was happening.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Trending topics are the new headlines.&nbsp; Said another way, they are news memes.</p>
<p>And the information being harvested on platforms like Twitter is now being analyzed for insights by companies like <a href="http://www.dataminr.com/">Dataminr</a>, which is building a platform for fund managers and traders to leverage the intelligence emerging from below.&nbsp; We are in the early innings of learning how to detect signal in the noise, but here again is a huge opportunity that will play out in fascinating ways.</p>
<p><strong>Start-ups.</strong>&nbsp; As I <a href="http://www.rre.com/blog/28-your-start-up-isn-t-unique-and-that-doesn-t-matter">wrote</a> this past summer, most start-ups are not unique and it is common for similar companies to pitch me at the same time.&nbsp; This isn&rsquo;t because people are stealing each other&rsquo;s ideas, but because the conditions for their emergence are ripe.&nbsp; As <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/malcolm-gladwell">Malcolm Gladwell</a> <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all">wrote in the New Yorker</a> a few years ago:</p>
<p style="margin-left: 0.5in;">Scientific discoveries must, in some sense, be inevitable.&nbsp; They must be in the air, products of the intellectual climate of a specific time and place.</p>
<p>The marketplace itself acts as the meme-producing platform for start-ups.&nbsp; First, there is the emergence of similar looking companies, followed by a winnowing of the market as certain players out-execute others, and concluding with a subset of winners.</p>
<p>In an emergent start-up ecosystem, my job as a VC becomes principally one of immersion and observation.&nbsp; I do not need to predict the future, only put myself in the right place and watch carefully for early indications of market resonance.&nbsp; As with all other memes, start-ups work first and emerge second.&nbsp; This is what underlies the iterative <a href="http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/">lean-startup framework</a>.</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>There are many more examples &ndash; in fact it&rsquo;s hard for me to think of a domain where memes aren&rsquo;t beginning to take hold.&nbsp; As I said above, this is the context for the historical moment we are entering.&nbsp; And there are big, investable opportunities (if you have one you want to discuss, I'd love to talk - <a href="mailto:adam@rre.com">adam@rre.com</a> or follow <a href="http://www.twitter.com/adamludwin">@adamludwin</a>).</p>
<p>But what if your livelihood depends on being a top-downer?&nbsp; What if you are in government, or a school administrator, or a brand manager for a cola beverage?&nbsp; How do you succeed in a world where the intelligence, tastes, and decision rights are shifting from above, concentrated in a few, to below, dispersed across all?</p>
<p>When we talk about &ldquo;progressive schools&rdquo; and &ldquo;smart government&rdquo; and even &ldquo;viral marketing&rdquo; I think we mean essentially the same thing.&nbsp; That these institutions become platforms to capture, disseminate, and build upon the best of what that comes from below.&nbsp; For schools, that means having students do the work at home and bring their best ideas to class the next day to debate and learn together, where the teacher plays role of facilitator.&nbsp;</p>
<p>For government, it means figuring out how to create a democracy that is inclusive of the best ideas that emerge organically.&nbsp; And for marketers, the first step is learning how to let the brand become a meme (you&rsquo;ll know it&rsquo;s working if you feel like you&rsquo;ve completely lost control, as happened with <a href="http://memecreator.net/the-most-interesting-man-in-the-world/">The Most Interesting Man</a>).&nbsp; As <a href="http://blog.aweissman.com/2011/11/golden-age-of-internet-marketing.html">Andy Weissman wrote</a>&nbsp;recently, we may be entering a golden age of marketing, and I think that&rsquo;s in large part because we&rsquo;re entering the age of the memes.</p>
<p>Often the exception proves the rule, and if you&rsquo;re still not convinced that memes are taking over, or that top-downers are going extinct, look no further than <a href="http://www.vice.com/the-vice-guide-to-travel/vice-guide-to-north-korea-1-of-3">North Korea</a>, the last bastion of isolation, cut off entirely from the world&rsquo;s collective mind.&nbsp; The reason the video below is so damn funny (which is itself part of a larger Party Rock Anthem meme) is because of the absolute contrast between those seen in the video, who&rsquo;s every action is directed from above, and the music, which they have surely never heard.</p>
<p><iframe width="618" height="449" frameborder="0" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/VJNBfBr-OGU"></iframe></p>
<p><em>This <a href="http://rre.com/blog/37-the-age-of-the-meme" target="_blank">post</a> originally appeared at <a href="http://rre.com/blog/" target="_blank">RRE Ventures</a>.<br /></em></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/from-lolcats-to-occupy-wall-street-progress-is-happenning-from-the-bottom-up-2011-12#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/sailthru-raises-8-million-round-led-by-rre-ventures-2011-9Smart Email Provider Sailthru Raises $8 Million Round Led By RRE Ventureshttp://www.businessinsider.com/sailthru-raises-8-million-round-led-by-rre-ventures-2011-9
Tue, 20 Sep 2011 07:59:00 -0400Alyson Shontell
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/4e77c82becad04203c00003e/neil-ian.jpg" border="0" alt="Neil Ian" /></p><p><strong>Sailthru</strong>, <span>a New York startup that personalizes and recommends web content for users,</span> just raised an $8 million Series A round led by <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/rre-ventures" class="hidden_link">RRE Ventures</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/aol" class="hidden_link">AOL</a> Ventures, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/dfj-gotham" class="hidden_link">DFJ Gotham</a> Ventures, Hatteras Funds, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/lerer-ventures" class="hidden_link">Lerer Ventures</a>, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/pilot-group" class="hidden_link">Pilot Group</a>, and <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/joshua-kushner-2010-9">Thrive Capital</a> also participated in the round.</p>
<p>Cofounder <strong>Neil Capel</strong> tells us investors were excited by Sailthru's 30% month over month revenue growth. The startup has been cash-flow positive since April.</p>
<p>Sailthru began as an email service provider in 2008; it has since launched behaviorally-targeted tools used by more than 80 publishers and e-commerce sites.</p>
<p>Sailthru uses JavaScript to track everything users do on partner websites, from articles they read to items they view. Sailthru uses the information to <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/yournews">personalize and recommend content</a>, both on the sites and in email newsletters, which keep users engaged.&nbsp;</p>
<p>For instance, if a woman is looking at a black purse on <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/gilt-groupe" class="hidden_link">Gilt Groupe</a>, Sailthru might recommend another black bag for her to view next. And, If you go to <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/yournews">Business Insider - Your News</a>, you can see which articles Sailthru is recommending for you based on your recent reads.</p>
<p>"I wanted to build a system that solved the problems I had as a CTO," says Capel.&nbsp; "Email service providers only make it easy to send mass mail, not to communicate with individuals. Sailthru elongates the lifetime of every user on a website."</p>
<p>Capel says Sailthru will use the financing to double its staff from 30 to 60 people over the next twelve months. It will also be launching a behaviorally-targeted advertising product. It previously <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/sailthru-funding-2010-7">received $1 million in financing from DFJ Gotham</a> in 2010.</p>
<p><em>Disclosure: Ian White, cofounder of Sailthru, was an early <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/business-insider" class="hidden_link">Business Insider</a> employee and we're happy for him!<br /></em></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/sailthru-raises-8-million-round-led-by-rre-ventures-2011-9#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/startup2011/tickets-early-bird-2011-03Last Chance For Early-Bird Tickets To Startup 2011http://www.businessinsider.com/startup2011/tickets-early-bird-2011-03
Mon, 14 Mar 2011 09:55:00 -0400Business Insider
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<td style="color: #000000; text-decoration: none; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; font-family: verdana, arial, sans serif;" width="550"><span style="color: #ca002d; text-decoration: none; font-size: 21px; line-height: 21px; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans serif;"><strong>CALLING ALL DIGITAL ENTREPRENEURS</strong></span><br /><br /><img style="float:right;" src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4d7a648d49e2ae783e060000/image.jpg?maxX=328&amp;maxY=228" border="0" alt="fred Wilson" width="328" height="228" /><span style="color: #000000; text-decoration: none; font-size: 16px; line-height: 18px; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans serif;"><strong>Tuesday, May 10, 2011<br />New World Stages, NYC</strong></span><br /><br /> Startup 2011 is NYC's premier business plan competition and entrepreneurship conference. Headlined by keynote speaker Fred Wilson, the <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/startup2011/speakers">speaker list</a> is shaping up fantastically and we're psyched for a jam-packed day that will cover these topics and more:
<ul>
<li>What I did differently the second time around: Lessons from serial entrepreneurs </li>
<li>Raising money and cashing out: M&amp;A, IPOs, and more </li>
<li>Small company, big deal: How startups can land monster biz dev deals<strong>&nbsp;</strong></li>
<li>The art of the pivot</li>
<li>Hiring tech talent</li>
<li>Conversations with Fred Wilson, Gina Bianchini, Esther Dyson, John Borthwick, and many more</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>&gt; </strong>Secure your spot at the conference now: <strong><a href="http://businessinsider.ticketleap.com/startup-2011/">JUST FOUR DAYS LEFT FOR EARLY-BIRD TICKETS.</a></strong></p>
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<p><span style="color: #ca002d; text-decoration: none; font-size: 16px; line-height: 18px; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans serif;"><strong> 2011 Event highlights:</strong></span><strong>&nbsp;</strong></p>
<p><strong>New s</strong><strong>tart-up friendly pricing</strong> and reasonable prices for everyone else.</p>
<p><strong>Business Plan Competition:</strong> The winner will walk away with a $25,000 cash investment from founding sponsor <strong>General Catalyst Partners</strong> and $75,000 worth of goods and services to boost his or her startup. Our VC partners--<strong>Joel Cutler</strong> of General Catalyst, <strong>David Pakman</strong> of Venrock, <strong>Rick Heitzman</strong> of FirstMark, <strong>Stuart Ellman</strong> of RRE, <strong>Habib Kairouz </strong>of Rho, and <strong>Laura Sachar</strong> of Starvest--will grill the presenters and pick the most worthy to receive the big check.</p>
<p><strong>&gt; </strong>Apply <a href="https://angelsoft.net/business-plan-competition/silicon-alley-insider/apply">here to </a><strong><a href="https://angelsoft.net/business-plan-competition/silicon-alley-insider/apply">enter your company</a> </strong>in the competition.<strong><br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>More info:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/startup2011/rules">Official Business Plan Competition Rules</a></li>
<li><a href="https://angelsoft.net/business-plan-competition/silicon-alley-insider/apply">Enter the competition</a></li>
<li><a href="http://businessinsider.ticketleap.com/startup-2011/">Tickets</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.nwsevents.com/">Venue: New World Stages</a>, 340 West 50th St.</li>
<li>Twitter.com/startupSAI - #startup2011</li>
<li>Question? Email startup2011 [at] businessinsider.com</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>2010 Wrap-up:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/congratulations-to-redbeacon-winner-of-startup-2010-2010-5">Congratulations to the 2010 winner, Redbeacon!</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/dennis-crowley-foursquare-2010-5">Video highlights</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-happened-at-startup-2010-2010-5#emily-allen-of-business-insider-scoops-herself-some-chow-1">Photo album</a><strong>&nbsp;</strong></li>
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</table><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/startup2011/tickets-early-bird-2011-03#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/so-youre-an-mba-student-that-wants-to-work-in-venture-capital-2011-3So You’re An MBA Student Who Wants To Work In Venture Capital?http://www.businessinsider.com/so-youre-an-mba-student-that-wants-to-work-in-venture-capital-2011-3
Mon, 14 Mar 2011 09:02:00 -0400Adam Ludwin
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/4c87ebc37f8b9a7346810800/graduates.jpg" border="0" alt="Graduates" /></p><p>It&rsquo;s that time of year again. MBAs who hope to break into the the VC business are ramping up their efforts, either for a summer internship or full-time employment.</p>
<p>It can be a frustrating experience. The first thing you realize is how few positions are actually open (yes, you have 75 firms in your Excel sheet, but many don&rsquo;t hire junior staff, those that do don&rsquo;t seem to have any vacancies, and there&rsquo;s a good chance a lot of them won&rsquo;t raise new funds anytime soon).&nbsp; But you push onward anyway and begin talking to VCs, starting with alums from your school.</p>
<p>That&rsquo;s when they start discouraging you directly: &ldquo;Well <em>we&rsquo;re</em> not hiring but I&rsquo;ll let you know if I hear of anyone that is&rdquo; ... &ldquo;Go join a start-up first and get some experience&rdquo; &hellip; &ldquo;Get a job in corporate development, that way you&rsquo;ll meet a lot of VCs!&rdquo;&nbsp; And when you ask about the path they took, you hear long-winded tales that aren&rsquo;t particularly helpful or instructive.&nbsp; You begin to lose hope and assume that unless you are a Harvard computer science drop-out who started a company at age 21 and sold it to Google for $500M before deciding to &ldquo;take a break&rdquo; by going to business school, your chances of working in VC are roughly equivalent to competing in the 2012 Olympic Games.</p>
<p>This is when most people stop trying. Which means it is exactly when you should be doubling-down your efforts. But only if you are willing to do three things:</p>
<p><strong>1. Become fluent.&nbsp;</strong></p>
<p>This is an absolute must. Just as you can&rsquo;t work in a foreign country without speaking the local business language, you cannot land a job in VC unless it&rsquo;s clear from the outset that you are current on what is happening in the marketplace.</p>
<p>This means that if you want to get a job investing in web companies, you&rsquo;d better know of and have an opinion about new companies like Tumblr, Kickstarter, Flipboard, and Kik. You should know who the most active VCs in the sector are, what sort of valuations the deals are getting done at, and which big companies are doing the most M&amp;A.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Do you think AOL paid too much for The Huffington Post? What is the future of the online advertising stack? Was it a good idea for Yuri Milner to blindly invest in every Y Combinator company? Will Facebook&rsquo;s valuation soar or plummet after an IPO? Picplz or Instagram? Will the Groupon business model survive as we climb out of the recession? Will New York become the new hub of consumer internet companies or is it overheated? Should startups invest in Android or iOS first?</p>
<p>How do you become fluent? Use Twitter actively and start following lots of entrepreneurs, techies, and VCs (@adamludwin is a decent start =)). Read what they recommend. Set up an RSS reader and browse the big tech blogs every day. But most importantly, surround yourself with actual people who are fluent themselves. It&rsquo;s a smaller community than you might think. Go to the events in the city you want to work in (check out <a href="http://www.garysguide.org/">www.garysguide.org</a> and <a href="http://www.meetup.com/">www.meetup.com</a>). Take as many coffee shop meetings as you can with people who can help you learn&nbsp; The best way to become fluent in a foreign language is immersion.&nbsp; This process is no different.</p>
<p><strong>2. Build a positive reputation.</strong></p>
<p>Many people assume they will be good at venture because they think they have good instincts about which start-ups will work and which will fail (&ldquo;I knew Facebook was going to be huge the moment I saw it and I totally called the demise of ChatRoulette!&rdquo;) The truth is that differentiating between promising and dull opportunities is only half the battle (and you're often wrong). What is just as difficult is getting the most promising and talented entrepreneurs to want to work with <em>you</em>.</p>
<p>Think of it like the competition between business schools. If you started a new business school tomorrow, and you were only willing to admit Ivy League grads with GMAT scores above 750, how could you possibly compete with HBS and Stanford?&nbsp; It&rsquo;s not hard to see who the best students are; it&rsquo;s hard to convince them to come to your school.</p>
<p>Ditto in startup land. In today&rsquo;s market, entrepreneurs hold the power. The only way to be a top performing fund is to invest in the best opportunities without overpaying, which requires that the top entrepreneurs consistently decide to take your money.</p>
<p>What does this have to do with you? Well, if you want to market yourself as an asset to a VC, there&rsquo;s nothing more valuable than being at the center of a large network of entrepreneurs and technologists who respect, admire and trust your judgment and experience.</p>
<p>How do you build such a network? Start at your school. Then expand into your wider professional network.&nbsp; Help every aspiring entrepreneur you can find in any way you can: offer your best feedback on what they&rsquo;re doing, make introductions, keep an eye out for competitors. If you have money, invest in the ones you think are promising. Organize and participate in events. And go for quality over quantity: spend more time with fewer people and give them your best. We&rsquo;ve all met superficial networkers and you don&rsquo;t want to be one of them.</p>
<p>The startup world is a brutally Darwinian place where what you did before B-school matters far less than if you are perceived as someone who can accelerate the trajectory of a start-up through your energy, intelligence, and network.&nbsp; In other words, your reputation is your resume, so start building it now.</p>
<p><strong>3. Commit and be patient.</strong></p>
<p>Finally, if you are serious about working in VC, you have to fully commit to the search and prepare for a longer journey than your classmates. You have to be willing to put in many hours a week and do detailed homework to figure out which firms are raising a new fund, which associates are about to be promoted or are leaving (thereby opening up a slot), and which firms have the right cultural, sector, and geographic fit for you.</p>
<p>You need to be willing to graduate without a job. You shouldn&rsquo;t hesitate to pass on the offer to go back to your consulting firm or investment bank. You need to find creative ways to get your foot in the door at a VC and start working for them by sourcing interesting deals, suggesting new investment themes, and helping their portfolio companies in any way you can. And you need to talk to as many VCs as you possibly can as often as possible. The best way to do this is to be helpful in some capacity every time you speak to them.</p>
<p>The truth is that it typically takes years &ndash; not months &ndash; to find your way into a venture firm.&nbsp; So start now and don&rsquo;t give up.</p>
<p>Ultimately, if VC is the right career for you, none of what I said will sound arduous or unnatural. To the contrary, it&rsquo;s probably what you&rsquo;re already doing. And in fact, the qualities required to land a job in VC &ndash; hard work, ingenuity, and equanimity in the face of uncertainty &ndash; are the same ones that will help you succeed once you finally land a spot. Good luck!</p>
<p><em>This <a href="http://www.rre.com/blog/so-you%E2%80%99re-mba-student-wants-work-venture-capital">post</a> originally appeared at <a href="http://www.rre.com/blog/">RRE Ventures Blog</a>. </em></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/so-youre-an-mba-student-that-wants-to-work-in-venture-capital-2011-3#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/howaboutwe-raises-3-million-2010-11HowAboutWe Raises $3.1 Million For Its New Take On Online Datinghttp://www.businessinsider.com/howaboutwe-raises-3-million-2010-11
Wed, 03 Nov 2010 09:55:00 -0400Nick Saint
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4cd1692fcadcbba721070000-400-/howaboutwe-cofounders-aaron-schildkrout-and-brian-schecter.jpg" border="0" alt="HowAboutWe cofounders Aaron Schildkrout and Brian Schecter" width="400" /></p><p>Dating startup <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/how-about-we">HowAboutWe</a> has raised a $3.1 million series A round of funding led by <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/rre-ventures">RRE Ventures</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.howaboutwe.com/">HowAboutWe</a> is a dating site with an emphasis on the actual dating, rather than online activity. The site revolves around <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/how-about-we-2010-8">proposing and accepting specific date ideas</a> that complete the sentence "how about we..."</p>
<p>That idea plays very well with users, which helped it get plenty of attention from mainstream media outlets when it launched. It also opens up <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/how-about-we-2010-8">a lot of interesting revenue possibilities</a> beyond the traditional subscription fees. Since How About We is about sending people on specific dates, there is an obvious opportunity in 'featured date proposals'. The site already does this on a small scale, but down the line we'd expect it to partner with a deal site to expand this as it moves from a New York City-only service to a national one.</p>
<p>The company is using the money to staff up. John Pignata from Pivotal Labs signed on as CTO and helped recruit three other developers. HowAboutWe will now add a marketing team as it pushes toward a national rollout in the next few months.</p>
<p>RRE was joined in the round by <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/founder-collective">Founder Collective</a>, LaunchTime, Josh Kushner, George Kliavkoff, and other angel investors.</p>
<p>Here's a 30 second pitch from the companies founders, Aaron Schildkrout and Brian Schecter:</p>
<script src="http://player.ooyala.com/player.js?height=316&amp;embedCode=xqOTBsMTpdoyHuCwSI2BcqvDhnq5SHKQ&amp;deepLinkEmbedCode=xqOTBsMTpdoyHuCwSI2BcqvDhnq5SHKQ&amp;width=560"></script><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/howaboutwe-raises-3-million-2010-11#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/banksimple-funding-2010-9EXCLUSIVE: Early Twitter Employee Alex Payne's Online Bank Startup, BankSimple, Raises A Big Roundhttp://www.businessinsider.com/banksimple-funding-2010-9
Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:59:00 -0400Nick Saint
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/4b2284630000000000544c6b/bank-vault-cash.jpg" border="0" alt="bank vault cash" /></p><p><a href="http://banksimple.com">BankSimple</a>, a new type of technology-focused, online-only banking startup cofounded by an early Twitter employee, has just completed a round of venture funding, SAI has learned.</p>
<p>First Round Capital's Josh Kopelman, IA Ventures' Roger Ehrenberg, and Village Ventures' Matt Harris led the round, which will close shortly. Angels including Ron Conway joined in.</p>
<p>The startup was founded by CEO Josh Reich, CFO Shamir Karkal, and CTO Alex Payne, one of <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/twitter">Twitter</a>'s first employees, and the man who predicted that new features on Twitter's home page <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-previews-the-redesign-that-will-make-you-not-want-to-use-a-desktop-client-2010-4">would eliminate the need for desktop clients</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/banksimple">BankSimple</a> says its goal is to "automate the hard parts of banking and make it easy for our customers to understand and manage their money." Since there are high regulatory barriers to entry in banking, BankSimple isn't a bank itself, but rather works on an affiliate model, depositing its customers' money in other, FDIC-insured banks. It issues a single ATM/Debit/Credit card, and offers some neat high tech features like the ability to cash checks using your smartphone.</p>
<p>BankSimple has two main selling points: simplicity, and, especially, transparency. The company is born from outrage at the revenue model of existing commercial banks: sticking their customers with hidden fees and penalties. BankSimple insists it won't do any of that. And, because it won't have any physical branches to support, it can afford to be telling the truth about that.</p>
<p>Of course, the startup has a huge hurdle to clear in earning consumers' trust. Even if we don't <em>like </em>our banks, they are huge names, and we can hand them our life savings secure in the knowledge that they won't steal or lose it outright. But if it can get past that, this could be a huge opportunity. Many consumers, especially younger, more technologically-inclined ones, don't have much use for physical banks, and we'd rather not pay for them.</p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/banksimple-funding-2010-9#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p>